Trust me?”
Lenna smiled reluctantly. “It’s hard not to. But I’d rather be a Starwolf.”
7
Ten packs of Starwolf fighters were closing quickly on their target, the Union invasion force above Tryalna. Behind them cruised the vast, menacing shape of their carrier, three kilometers of sleek, powerful fighting ship. And the Union forces appeared to be waiting for them. Their handful of warships pulled back instantly, not in retreat but to assume a battle formation.
Schayressa Kalvyn did not like what she saw. Something about that quick defense made her suspect that the Unioners had been waiting for her. Surely they should have expected Starwolves to come sooner or later. But it seemed almost that their attack on Tryalna had been a ruse, that their real objective was to fight her. And that simply made no sense. Something else that was not normal was that armored battle station that sat parked in remote orbit. It was far larger than anything she had ever seen, heavy with armor and cannons, and that made her very uneasy. At least it was slow enough to be harmless.
“Is anything wrong?” Commander Tryn asked. He could always tell when Schayressa was worried by the furtive movements of her camera pod.
“I do not like it,” she answered. “Too many things simply are not quite as they should be.”
“Is it that battle station?” Tryn asked.
“What do you think?” the ship asked in return. “That thing is five times larger than any mobile battle station I have ever seen. What are they doing with something like that?”
“They mean to hold on to Tryalna whatever the cost. If this world goes free, five more will revolt in the coming month. Their entire forced sterility program will face a major setback.”
“Which is why we have to make sure that Tryalna stays free,” Schayressa agreed. “Still, I do not like that machine. I am going to check it out.”
She changed course abruptly to intercept the thing. She would not willingly call it a ship. At twenty-five kilometers in length and wider than she was long, it was by far the largest machine she had ever seen moving under its own power. She had seen mobile stations before, but nothing this big. It was certainly the first thing she had seen in a long time that made her feel dainty. Her intention was to come close enough for a thorough scan, then proceed to blow it to bits.
“We are going to full battle alert,” she announced over inter-ship com. “Everyone to your stations. Stand by your monitors and manual controls. We will be coming into firing range in less than a minute.”
“Does it worry you that much?” Tryan asked.
Schayressa brought her camera pod around to the upper bridge. “I can see from here that it has the shields and cannons of a planetary defense system. There is certainly going to be a fight.”
“Bad?”
“Well, I am going to prime my conversion cannon, just in case.”
Commander Tryn stared at her in surprise. “If it worries you that much, then leave it alone. Break off.”
“I cannot,” she answered. “If that thing is a mobile planetary defense system, it might take half the wolf fleet to crack that nut once they get it into operation.”
“Then we have no choice,” the Commander agreed reluctantly. He had been a first-rate fighter for most of his three hundred and ten years, a fearsome pilot and pack leader and the best strategist in the fleet… at least until Velmeran had come along. But he did not like unknowns, and he thoroughly disliked anything that made his ship nervous.
Schayressa banked sharply as she came into good scanning range, dropping down nearly to the plodding crawl of her target as she began a careful scan. What she saw surprised and frightened her. But still she held on, probing every bolt and circuit of that ship. For it was indeed a ship, a fighting ship the likes of which she had never seen.
“Commander!” Keldryn, the helm, warned suddenly.
“I see it,” Schayressa answered. Her power sensors leaped off the scale as the immense ship engaged its drives and threw up its shields. Schayressa brought up her own battle shields and targeted her largest cannons.
In the next instant she was under fire. A steady barrage of bolts centered on the Starwolf carrier with deadly accuracy, deflecting off the battle shields with a sound like hailstones ringing against the hull. Occasional shots penetrated the shields to skip off the gentle curve of the armored hull, sounding like strikes even though the bolts deflected harmlessly. Then one shot hit at just the right attitude, biting into the thick armor. The achronic carrier beam discharged its full load of raw energy and superheated metal exploded. It was a minute tear against the vast, featureless expanse of the armored upper hull, but it was only the first of many scores.
Schayressa Kalvyn fought back fiercely. Her own cannons were more accurate and slightly more powerful, but she had only ten against thousands. And yet her shots were deflected harmlessly by the hull of the giant warship. One of her shots struck an unarmored section of a turret and the entire upper portion of the gun exploded. Clued by that, she set her targeting computers to concentrate on the Fortress’s guns, the only part of the ship she seemed able to damage.
“Tryn, I cannot fight this thing,” she said, and paused a moment as a bolt struck almost directly overhead. “They are trying to hit my bridge, and they seem to have a fair idea where it is. And I cannot hurt them in return. That entire ship is covered by quartzite panels backed by a very firm shield.”
“Break off!” he told her.
“Not yet,” she said. “If nothing else. I have will work against this thing, I am going to give it my coversion cannon. I have already called back my packs to support me… damnation!”
“What?” Tryn asked, perplexed.
“Stingships! Wave upon wave of stingships. There must be a thousand in all, with battleships and destroyers closing from every direction.
Another explosion rocked the entire ship. Tryn glanced around apprehensively, well aware that something major had been hit. “What was that?”
“One of my forward engines,” Schayressa replied absently. “Prepare for firing. Keldryn, stand ready to take the helm.”
Schayressa ceased firing as she readied her conversion cannon, opening the armored portal in the flattened hexagonal tube beneath her shock bumper. In the conversion chamber at the base of that tube, over half a kilometer back from the Kalvyn’s tapered nose, hundreds of liters of distilled water were being converted rapidly into energy, temporarily confined within heavy containment fields. Special field-projecting antennas dropped down to either side of the cannon’s muzzle, which glowed with the white-hot energy contained at its core.
In the final seconds before firing, Schayressa centered the cannon by aiming herself at her target. At the same time the Fortress ceased firing and cut all acceleration as if calmly awaiting certain destruction. Then, even as the Kalvyn fired, the Challenger merged the full power of all her generators into the formation of a single defensive shield so powerful that it enveloped the entire ship in a solid white sphere. That devastating blast of raw energy from the conversion cannon struck the shield dead center… and was deflected harmlessly.
From the Kalvyn’s point of view, that was not immediately apparent. For three full seconds she poured the power of a star against that glowing white shell. Seconds more passed as the glowing clouds of red, yellow, and blue dissipated and nothing could be seen. Then the Fortress emerged from that fiery mass, unharmed. The vast warship seemed to pause a moment to look around, then turned every gun it could on the Starwolf carrier.
Engaging her star drive momentarily, she jumped past the Fortress and out of range in a matter of seconds. Coasting at just sunlight, she made a slow retreat out of the system to give her fighters a chance to overtake her,
